This was quite an eye-opener. As I had been reading some of E.E. "Doc" Smith's books, someone mentioned to me that several of his concepts for aliens were very inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars series (or, as I've learned, the "Barsoom" series), and never having read any Burroughs, I thought it might be fun to give the first book a read!
This book was originally serialized in All-Story Magazine, all the way back in 1912. Burroughs saw a lot of what he perceived as hack storytelling in the pulps of the time, and thought maybe he could do better. His strange and fantastic writings became extremely famous, and perhaps more importantly, influential on the path that science fiction took in the following decades.
This book begins with a very clever foreword, by Burroughs "himself." He talks about his distant relative John Carter and talks about the strange circumstances of his life (he was a Confederate army officer, and later a soldier of fortune) and the manuscript that follows. It's a brilliant bit of foreshadowing that just seems weird and quirky when you first read it, but later on takes on entirely new meanings.
Carter was prospecting for gold out in the American Southwest when a strange thing happened that essentially transported him to what we know as Mars, or, in the language of its natives, Barsoom.
Barsoom is dying, and the various races are all fighting to maintain their numbers, the small bits of arable land that remain, and the failing atmosphere. They are becoming more savage over time, as a result of their constant struggles.
In this first book, we meet the green and white races. The green race of men is a gigantic warrior race of nomads. The description of the Osnomian race in Doc Smith's Skylark series is clearly based on these green men. The red race is more human-sized, and maintains technology and some level of stationary civilization.
Carter's adventure starts with the green men and moves on to work with the red eventually. Carter's ignorance of the world's cultures is a constant issue. He spends the first third of the book in a creative and peculiar position with the green men: both a prisoner and a chieftain, due to his besting some of the green men in battle.
The adventure has a lot of ups and downs, and a romance grows between Carter and the red Martian princess. There are tons of battles, with swashbuckling and sharpshooting, but the detail levels are pretty low in general for the fights. The vibe is something like, "John Carter killed one alien, then tricked three more into trying to corner him, and that's when he fought back and took them down one at a time." Pretty basic stuff, but entertaining.
Burroughs, writing as Carter, is strangely wordy, with an oddly elevated tone. I'm not sure if he was trying to imitate known Confederate soldiers' letters or something, but it was something that continually irked me slightly.
The alien life on Barsoom is largely described by its use in analogy with Earth life. There are hunting dogs, horses, etc. While their descriptions are imaginative, they are also somewhat pigeon-holed into their functions.
A race of great white apes is a constant danger.
John Carter also claims some telepathic powers, but at the same time, they are applied a little inconsistently, or at least that was my perception. The rules seemed kind of ad-hoc, as if designed for narrative convenience.
One other element of the story that would inspire other science fiction writers is the idea of two additional "colors" of light that can be split off with special prisms. The ubiquitous use of so-called "radium" power is another early sci-fi staple.
Through the story, Carter leads several interesting campaigns: escape, insurrection, and war. There's quite a lot going on, but almost all of it happens "in the moment," so there's almost no extended intrigue. A few plot threads even seem to get somewhat forgotten, only to be suddenly picked up much later.
The ending is bizarre. A genuine "what were you thinking, man?!" moment. Then the very, very end makes the foreword make sense, and also makes room for a sequel.
It was a fun book, but not mind-blowing. From what I've heard, this first book was a little rough, and perhaps future books will be a bit more gripping. Still, I enjoyed most of it and it was gratifying to see origins for so many of what I consider old science fiction tropes.
Read it here:
https://archive.org/details/edgar-rice-burroughs_a-princess-of-mars
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